Music

The highly anticipated documentary on blues legends Downchild is entitled FLIP FLOP AND FLY 40 YEARS OF THE DOWNCHILD BLUES BAND and will make it's national broadcast premier in Canada on Saturday, December 4, 2010 at 6.25 p.m. on TMN (HBO Canada)

The documentary was filmed last fall as part of the band's 40th Anniversary Tour and is narrated by their biggest fan, friend and supporter Mr. DAN AYKROYD. FLIP FLOP AND FLY captures the rich history of Canada's ground breaking blues band through candid interviews and "once in a lifetime" live concert footage from their sold out performance at Massey Hall with special guests DAN AYKROYD, COLIN JAMES, American blues legend JAMES COTTON, Stax Records icon WAYNE JACKSON OF THE MEMPHIS HORNS, COLIN LINDEN and JONAS.

Kenyan guitarist/vocalist Adam Solomon has been a fixture on the Canadian world music scene for close on two decades and after all that time, he’s still not standing still.

Over that period genre fans have watched Solomon go from an evangelist for Africa’s myriad guitars styles through an Afro/rock fusion phase to his current interest in digging up the traces of the blues in African music and inserting them into North American blues styles.

Retaining his roots in traditional music, Adam's compositions embrace a wide variety of African rhythms, from traditional soukous, African Renaissance blues, highlife and reggae to samba, bossanova and rhumba. His African Renaissance Blues style brings the blues back to the African continent where they originated in tribal song structures. The effortless manner with which he controls the guitar so that it sings with him exemplifies the talent of this East African native. Little wonder in his youth he was called ‘the African Jimi Hendrix’.

Adam's style of guitar playing is renaissance in its careful fusion of the Mississippi Delta blues style of John Lee Hooker, BB King and Muddy Waters while highlighting the African blues style.

It used to be that a genre-bending act was described as a little bit country, a little bit rock’n’roll. These times, it’s more like a little bit pop, a little bit punk’n’roll. Which brings us to Day 2 Deja Vu, a trio out of darkest suburbia or Newmarket, which epitomises the state of rock’n’roll, a struggle for street cred and commercial success.

It makes historical sense they be coming out of the ‘burbs, traditionally the spawning ground for rock music. From the Stones through The Ramones to Kurt Cobain they all cooked their shit in the burbs before bringing it downtown.

And how much more classic rock’n’roll can you get than a band formed by two dudes working in a music store.

Sean MacLean is the bassist and deep-voiced singer with the band and on this particular day, its mouthpiece. The point’s worth making as D2DV is a democratic institution, being that all three members write the songs, there are two lead singers and all three harmonize.

“This is not the first band I’ve been in but it’s one that lasted long enough for me to believe it could go places. We’ve been together around five years, going through the mechanics of a young band, learning each others’ dynamics and going through all the necessary stylistic changes before arriving at the sound we now have”

In the background I can hear a hound baying; on the line is a genuine rock’n’roll road dawg. Meet Tim Bovaconti, 21st century musician as mercenary in the service of pop music.

What’s it take to qualify? For Bovaconti, this means 4 or 5 gigs in the average week and a minimum 200 gigs a year. He keeps busy on the road as guitarist with Classic rockers Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman (as a member of Bachman-Cummings as well as lead guitarist in Burton Cummings’ band) and recently recorded lead guitars and lap steel in Los Angeles with Burton for his album “Above the Ground”.

Then there are the frequent tours of 10 years standing with Ron Sexsmith, including a recently concluded European jaunt, and an ongoing series of shows with comic Sean Cullen.

Terry Sumsion is a man at peace with himself, with his world and especially with his music. As he continues to work on his new CD, scheduled soon for release, he has surrounded himself with the best of both worlds – or perhaps we should say that both worlds have surrounded him.

Terry refers to those who have rallied around him as his “Angels” – all very special people helping him fight a winning battle, each in their own way. Musicians, singers, songwriters and technicians who have joined with him to create a work that this writer feels is the best he has ever produced.

The CD (Terry Sumsion – Encore) will have something for everyone and as the first single “You GottaBelieve” showed, it will be an emotional journey for the listener as many of the songs have been inspired by Terry’s real-life battle with cancer.

The lady explains ‘How To Be Alone’ and the video scores a mil plus lonely hits.Story: Lenny StoutePhoto: Killbeat Music

Video may have killed the radio star but it can do wonders for a poet’s career. Hottest testifier to that truth’s Tanya Davis, a reasonably obscure Halifax poet who’s currently blowing up like Justin Beiber with her video for a tune off newest album, Clocks and Hearts Keep Going.

See, she also has a career as a singer/songwriter going on which has yielded three albums and while her press stuff’ll tell ya she does both things with equal fervour, when pressed she admits to being more poet than songwriter.

“ I stared writing poetry before songs and I do tend to go there first with an idea. A poet’s job is to observe and report; song writing is more about interpreting. Lyrics are structured differently because you have to keep rhythms and tempo in mind. Generally, it’s better for a song if the lyrics are shorter so you come at an idea differently.”

Both disciplines have their strictures but Davis seems to enjoy more freedom of experimentation as a poet. The fact that she specializes in ‘spoken word’ poetry creates a natural springboard to doing music. ‘Spoken word’ is poetry written purely to be performed live, making for a different approach than the stuff intended to appear on a printed page. Its power is in being heard, not read.

Diane Wirtz started singing at the age of 5 on week-ends when her father’s band would let her join in on their practices. At the age of 8 years her father was transferred to West Germany with the Air Force, where they would live for the next 4 years.

At the age of 12 the family moved back to New Brunswick but the Air Force transferred them again to Cold-Lake, Alberta. There was a group from the television show ” the Funny Farm Show ” who were singing on the base there.

Wirtz said. I had an opportunity to sing with their band called” Prairie Fire “. They invited her to go to Edmonton, Alberta where they were going to do a television program for the Variety Club Telethon. It was her first experience on television at the age of 17. She met Jamie Farr from the television show MASH, and Shari Lewis and Lamp Chop, the Alan Sisters from the Tommy Hunter show and Skyles and Henderson.

Wirtz said,”It was a fabulous experience for me and it gave me a chance to go in the recording studio with Prairie Fire and see what it was all about. I had gotten married and after a few months of marriage we were expecting a baby.

“ When I was in my eighth month of pregnancy the baby died. My brother who was 18 died in a motorcycle accident, then my Mother died and then my Grand-Mother died. She was the first person in my life to introduce me to our wonderful Savior.

Ottawa neojazz singer Kellylee Evans is still on cloud nine after her involvement in a dream project. The dream started last summer at a time when she was fantasizing about something different happening in her career. Having put out two albums independently, Evans was looking for a break from the DIY of it all. Top of her wish list, to work with a label so that in essence, all she would have to do is focus on singing satisfying material.

From her mouth to God’s ears it seems, as a week or so later, French boutique label Plus Loin contacted her with a proposition. Evans was on the label's radar thanks to her Monk competition success. That would be a second-place finish at the 2004 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition, a major springboard for her career. Which immediately took a turn away from the traditional stuff to material that was closer to pop and even smooth jazz, areas Evans was most interested in exploring. Since the Monk competition, Evans has had high-profile gigs opening for Tony Bennett, George Benson and Chris Botti at various Canadian jazz festivals, where her big, expressive voice and magnetic presence have garnered new fans.

The modern recording studio owes a great deal to that phonograph invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and its early recordings, made outside of a studio environment. Early recording studios often lacked isolation booths, baffles, and sometimes even speakers. Designed for live recording of an entire band or performance, they attempted to record a group of musicians and singers, rather than to record them separately.

With the introduction of multi-track recording, it became possible to record instruments and singers separately and at different times on different tracks on tape. From then on, the recording process shifted to isolation and soundproofing. In the 1960s, recordings were analog, made using ¼-inch or ½-inch eight-track magnetic tape. By the early 1970s, recordings progressed to using 1-inch or 2-inch 16- or 32-track equipment. Most contemporary recording studios now use digital recording equipment and the number of tracks is limited only by the capacity of the mixing console or computer.

Toronto, the heart beat of the Canadian banking and economy was a natural place for attracting international and national artists to record and relax in a metropolitan atmosphere using state of the art equipment without the street hassles and urban pressures of New York or L.A. Billboard reported glowingly in a 1972 story on Toronto’s emergence as Canada’s recording capital.

When Scotland Ruled….the pop charts.
An epic tale of Paul McCartney, the Mull Of Kintyre and the Canadian Connection.By Lenny Stoute

The Mull of Kintyre (formerly Cantyre) is the most southwesterly section of the long Kintyre Peninsula in southwestern Scotland, about 10 miles from Campbeltown.. The area’s significance as a cultural nexus dates back to Neolithic times. The name is an Anglicisation of the Gaelic ‘maol chinn tire’, the bare headland of Kintyre. Mull is derived from ‘ maol’ meaning bare and refers to a land formation bare of trees, such as a rounded hill, summit, mountain or promontory. It’s mostly in use in the southwest of Scotland, often applied to headlands and the tips of promontorys or peninsulas.

The area’s ancient and rugged geography pounded by the relentless North Sea is the picture book definition of “wild beauty”; travellers familiar with the region say the description is equally applicable to its women. Scotland’s mighty malt whiskies are likewise widely available throughout the region with servings the traditional ‘a full measure and a wee drop more’.